I am patrolling through the corridors when L finds me. I patrol through them several times a day, always at the same times. We all have our routines, I don't know why but we have them. Some of us ex-guards stay on certain places at the wall, waiting for nothing, and some us patrol, even when nopony alive would ever come up here.
I once had a 'partner' who accompanied me on my routes, but he disappeared someday.We never talked or interacted, just walked/limped together, like we weren't allowed to do so. Sometimes we went into the dark areas when the light went on. The spells for the lights and the other machines have lost most of their power, but they still flicker on at times. I cherish these moments. The feeling of things coming to life. I stand there and stare into the flickering light like it would allow me to ascend into Afterlife, that sugary dream of our childhoods, now a tasteless joke.
I stop my circumnavigation of the castle to find L waiting for me at a broken window. Bald, bruised and rotten, his grisly visage slides into my view as I limp over to him. He grunts to greet me, his ragged mouth oozing black drool.
I point in a vague direction and grunt, 'City'. It was meant as a question, but I'm not good in pronunciation anymore. He nods and follows me.
We are going to find food. A hunting party forms around us as we shuffle towards a town some miles away from the castle. We have a town here too, but there isn't much anymore.
It's not hard to find recruits for those expeditions, even if nopony is really hungry. Focused thought is a rare occurrence here, and we all follow it when it manifests. Otherwise we'd just be standing around and groaning all day. We do a lot of standing around and groaning at each other. Years pass this way. The flesh withers on our bones an we stand here, waiting for it to go. I often wonder how old I actually am.
The city where we do our hunting is relatively close. We arrive early in the morning the next day and start looking for flesh. The new hunger is a strange feeling. We don't feel it in our stomach, some of us don't even have one. We feel it everywhere, a sinking, sagging sensation, as if our cells are deflating.
While I stumble over a frozen corpse, I realize that it's getting winter again. Some areas of the city are already covered under tiny layers of snow and iced puddles cover the streets. I had to fall down several times before I understood that ice is no solid ground to walk. It's funny that I forget such simple things, but what do you want to do against it.
Last winter, when so many living joined the dead and our prey became scarce, I watched some of my friend become full-dead. The transition was undramatic. They just slowed down, then stopped, and after a while I realized they were corpses. It disquieted me at first, but it's kinda against the etiquette to notice when one of us dies so I did the only logical thing. Moaning and groaning to distract myself.
I think Equestria has mostly ended, because the cities we wander through are as rotten as we are. Buildings have collapsed. Once pompous carriages clog the streets and rust away. Most glass is shattered and the wind drifting through the hollow houses and shops moans like an animal left to die. I don't know what really happened. Disease? War? Social collapse?
Or was it just us? The dead replacing the living? It doesn't matter to me, it's not important. Once you've arrived at the end of the world, it hardly matter which route you took.
We starts to smell the living as we approach a dilapidated building which was built into a big now rotten and lifeless tree. The smell is not the musk of sweat and fur, but the effervescence of life energy. Compare it with the ionized tang of lightning and lavender. We don't smell it with our noses; it hits us deeper inside, we feel it near our useless hearts.
We let out a long and loud moan so the dispersed groups can join us. The living surely heard us and get prepared, but we count on overpowering them through pure mass anyways.
We stand there and wait in silence. There is no need to communicate, we already found what we were looking for. A couple of minutes later we are enough to flood the building twice. Some of us groan and we start to converge the building and crash our ways inside, I climb/fall through a smashed window to get in.
We find them huddled in an upper room, they built a barricade on the stair with everything they could find, but that won't hold long against so many hungry mouths. It took us like 30 seconds to breach through the rotten tables and planks.
They look more rugged than we do, wrapped in filthy tatters and rags, all of them badly in need of a bath and a shave. L will be saddled with a short gray beard for the rest of his fleshy existence, but everypony else in our party is relatively clean-shaven. It's one of the perks of being dead, another thing we don't have to worry about any more. We stay in the way we died, manes, tails or beards aren't growing anymore. Our once wild bodies have finally been tamed.
A bit faster then before and with unswerving commitment pushed by the hunger, we launch ourselves at the living. Arrows and sword thrusts sizzle through the air, black blood spatters the floor and walls. The loss of a leg, an ear, a portion of torso, this is disregarded and shrugged off. Not more than a minor cosmetic issue. But some of us loose their heads or take shots to our brains, and we drop. Apparently there's still something of value in that withered grey sponge, because if we lose it, we are dead-dead corpses.
The fellow dead to my left and right hit the ground with moist thuds, an arrow missed my head for an inch and now sticks into the neck of the mare behind me. The living try their best to stop is, but there are plenty of us. We are overwhelming. We set upon the living, and we eat.
Eating is not a pleasant business. I rip off a green mare's chest and take a big bite, and I hate it. I hate her screams and her crying, because I don't like pain, I don't like killing ponies, but that's the way the things are now. This is what we do. Of course I don't eat all of her, if I spare her brain she'll rise up and probably follow me back to castle, and that might make me feel better. I'll introduce her to L if he has survived, and maybe we'll stay around and groan for a while. It's hard for me to say what 'friends' are anymore, but that might be close.
Sparing her brain isn't that hard; ponies always believe we would prefer the brain but that's not really the truth. Of course I would eat it if I could, but cracking a skull isn't that easy, so I just spread her rips and go straight for the good part, that part that makes my head light up like a picture tube. I eat the heart and, for about 3 seconds, I feel alive and warm again.
Flashes of parades, perfume, music...life. Then it fades, and I get up, and we all stumble out of the city with our new brothers and sisters, still cold and dead, but feeling a little bit better. Not 'good', exactly, not 'happy', obviously not 'alive', but... a little less dead. This is the best we can do.